by Ali Merci
“You’re asking the wrong person, Asa,” she said softly, the angry scowl on her face fading. “Because it wasn’t me who saw anything redeemable in myself—I still don’t. It was you who saw the good in me, and I don’t know how you did it. The only person who can give you the answer you want is the one who stares back at you in the mirror.”
“Yeah.” He chuckled without mirth. “I’m a lost cause.”
“No.” She smiled, and for a fleeting moment, Asa saw the old Isla in there. “I’m a lost cause. Hunter’s a lost cause. Not you, Asa. You’re a compass. The only reason I didn’t start spiralling sooner was because you gave me some sense of direction.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” he concluded, sadness swimming in his eyes.
Isla shook her head slowly, swallowing and turning away. “That isn’t on you. You can’t force someone to change. They need to want that change for themselves, Asa.”
“Why don’t you want that change?”
Isla stared back with vacant eyes, and Asa realised he didn’t recognise the girl in front of him. Not anymore.
“I’m tired, Asa,” she eventually said, sliding down the headrest until she was lying on the bed. “Just tired.”
Asa sat there in the silence, watching as Isla grew drowsy and thinking back to Carmen’s words of her unwavering faith in Hunter.
Eventually he rose from the chair and walked towards her bed, pulling the sheets over her sleeping body. Asa thought about the last time he’d tucked her in, back when she’d stumbled drunk into his home.
He sighed and leant down, placing a light kiss to her forehead before standing to his full height and walking away.
Before he could move, however, Isla’s hand wrapped around his wrist, stopping him in his tracks.
Asa turned around to find her eyes half-open, struggling to fight sleep. “I’m sorry, Asa,” she mumbled, her eyes falling shut again. “I’m sorry for all the pain.”
His throat tightened, a prickling sensation behind his eyes as he tore his gaze away from Isla.
Asa had gotten the closure from her that he’d so desperately needed. Despite her flaws, Isla had come through for him on that. It didn’t erase all the times she’d broken his heart, the times she’d fallen off the wagon and dragged him down with her. But he could close this chapter of his life for good now. This was one place he didn’t have to visit anymore, one part of his past he no longer needed to look back on.
With one last glance towards her, Asa stepped out of the room and let the door close shut.
He no longer knew her, and she no longer knew him. And they were both better off this way.
•••
It had been four days since Carmen had heard from Asa.
Four days since she asked herself whether she wanted to climb out of that burning car.
Four days since she decided to stop cutting her fingers on the shards of their failed relationship in a futile attempt to salvage it.
Train wrecks weren’t salvaged. They were swept away, and they were cleaned up. And if there happened to be survivors, they were told to take time and rest, to nurse their wounds back to health. To allow themselves to heal.
But this wasn’t her first, was it? The first train wreck had been her mother’s suicide, and Carmen had never allowed herself to heal from it. And as much as she wanted to patch herself together after she’d lost what she thought would be a forever kind of love, there were still older wounds that needed tending to.
Maybe that had always been Carmen’s problem. She kept gluing back the pieces despite the knowledge that it was just a matter of time ’till she fell apart and broke again.
It wasn’t because she was weak. It was because she kept building back herself on a shaky foundation, a foundation that had split wide open when her mother died. And if Carmen wanted to pull herself out of the burning car, if she wanted to raise herself back up, she needed to make sure her feet had solid ground to stand on.
Carmen had hit rock bottom, and she could either see it as the death of who she was or the awakening of who she could become.
Did she want to grab onto that potential to be someone whole? Yes. She wanted to know what it’d be like to stand on a steady foundation. She wanted to know how it would feel to be able to let in love, and joy, and peace. She wanted to stop being so alone.
Carmen wanted to know who she could be once she’d broken free of the chains she let her past bind her with.
“What are you doing?”
Carmen didn’t respond right away and kept looking down at the photo album she’d dug up from the storage room that had been locked for a good many years now.
“I look a lot like her,” she whispered, as if too scared to disrupt the silence, as if the moment was too sacred for there to be any interruptions.
“You do,” her father said, his voice shaking the slightest bit.
Carmen felt the words rise to the tip of her tongue, felt them dance along the curve of her lips. But she held them back. Pushed them down her throat, pressed down on them ’till—
No.
No, wait.
Did she really want to bury the question? Or would she rather have it answered regardless of the response?
Would it be safe for her to open up? She needed to if she wanted her question answered. Right?
But letting herself ask that question might put her in a vulnerable spot. And that vulnerability might bring in a lot of pain—too much pain.
But, a voice in her head said, a voice that sounded like a boy with coffee eyes and cinnamon hair, But wouldn’t that vulnerability also give you closure?
It might bring Carmen pain, but it also might bring her peace. And Carmen was growing tired of the chaos in her bones and the storm in her soul. She wanted peace.
So, swallowing audibly and keeping her eyes fixed on the photographs, she let the words crawl back up her throat again. “Is... Is that why you can’t—why you can’t... ” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to steady her breathing. “I look a lot like her. Is that the problem why you can’t love me?”
She felt her father sit down on the floor next to her, their backs pressed against the couch while the album lay opened at their feet.
“Honey, what sort of question is that?” He sounded horrified. “Of course I love you.”
Carmen didn’t remember crying in her life, not in the last twelve years. But something in her had broken during Thanksgiving night. And it was getting easier to let her pain spill down her cheeks.
Maybe it was because of all the pain that sat there, gathering and piling atop one another. It had become a volcano, and the thing about volcanoes was that they had an ending point. And after that, came the eruption, the spewing out of all that which was buried too deep.
“You never say it.” She looked up at him through a watery vision. “Not after she died. In fact, I can’t remember you saying it before also. Back when she was still with us.”
So many emotions flitted across his face, all battling against each other for dominance. But his eyes. His eyes looked haunted and so full of pain. And Carmen wondered if there was a volcano in his heart too.
“It’s not—it’s not easy. I know that is no justification of me making you feel unloved…” her father trailed off, looking down at the photo, “I know you said apologies don’t matter after the crash has occurred, but I am sorry, Carmen. I am so goddamn sorry. I let you down, I let you lose your dad the same day you lost your mum, and I could never stop saying sorry for that. Making you feel like you weren’t loved—like you didn’t have a home—that’s not—that.” His voice cracked, unable to remain steady as the tremble in it grew worse.
“She never said it either.” The words were flowing freely from Carmen’s mouth now, all of them coming out in breaths, in a rush, as if there was not enough time to say all she wanted to say. “Mum, I mean. I don’t remember every single moment from my childhood but I can recall her not saying those three words to me. Then again, I can’t blame her, c
an I? I was her nightmare in the flesh.”
“Honey, she loved you—”
“No, she didn’t!” Carmen sobbed, her voice breaking at every syllable. “She didn’t, Dad! You don’t kill yourself because you love someone!”
Her father blinked back tears of his own, his mouth opening and closing like a fish on dry land. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that. She had you, didn’t she? She decided to—”
“Why did she have me?” Carmen wiped her cheeks, turning to face her dad. “If it was so hard for her to love me—if it was so hard for her to go on living while I also breathed—then why did she even choose to have me? She could have saved herself a lot of pain. She could’ve saved you a lot of pain. And she could’ve prevented me from being born into a world of misery.”
“She didn’t have it in her, love,” her father said softly, a single tear trickling down his face. “She couldn’t bear to go through with an abortion.”
Carmen scoffed, the bitterness and anger rolling off her in waves. “You know Cole’s mum once told me I should feel lucky that Mum didn’t get rid of me—that she chose to bring me into this world.” Carmen shook her head, running her palms over her cheeks again. “Is that what I’m supposed to do, Dad? Feel grateful? Because I don’t feel grateful. I don’t. Does that make me a bad person? I—I don’t know. I feel angry, though. Angry that she was a coward. She couldn’t live with the guilt of having an abortion so she brought me into this world. Angry that she couldn’t be a mother even after making that choice to have me. Angry she couldn’t love me the way a child is supposed to be loved.”
“Carmen—”
“No, Dad,” she cried. “She was a coward. She was! She couldn’t deal with the guilt of getting rid of me, and she couldn’t deal with me being alive, either so she took the easy way out! She didn’t once stop to think about what that would do to you, to Hunter, to the rest of the family. She didn’t care about the burden she was placing on me. She just didn’t care!”
Carmen thought she’d known pain and anguish. But this—this was a human fist shoved into her chest, nails digging into her skin, tearing through the flesh and the bones, piercing her veins and dragging her heart out.
Her whole body racked with the sobs, her wordless cries of “Please hold on please hold on please hold on” shaking her shoulders violently as if they were finally getting rid of the universe that sat perched upon those bones.
Was this what letting it all out felt like? Because it hurt too much. Too much. Letting go of pain wasn’t supposed to hurt you. The irony in it was twisted, another one of life’s sick jokes.
“And you know what the worst part is?” Carmen sniffed, running a hand under her nose. “I feel like shit because of my anger towards her. I feel like a horrible, horrible person because I hate her more than I miss her, Dad! And I don’t know how to live with that.”
“Shh, shh, come here.” Her father scooted closer, wrapping his arms around her. Carmen let herself melt into the embrace, tucking her head under his chin. “You’re not horrible, Carmen. You’re human. And Cole’s mum doesn’t get to tell you what you’re supposed to feel. You just feel what you feel. Emotions don’t come with instruction manuals, love.”
“I hate Mum.” She wept into her father’s chest. “I hate her. I hate her so much. I hate that she makes me feel so much anger towards someone I’m supposed to mourn, and what I hate even more is that at the end of the day, I don’t think I really hate her at all.”
“You have a heart that is far too beautiful to be consumed by hate, honey,” he murmured, rubbing a soothing hand down her back. “And I don’t know what to tell you to take away the pain your mother left behind, but I can tell you that I love you. I can assure you that you are loved. I loved you long before you came into this world. I loved you since the moment your mother conceived you—that’s nine months of loving you long before any other person in this world has. You are loved, baby girl, you are loved.” His arms tightened around her, and Carmen felt one of his tears fall against her cheek, colliding into one of her own.
“You are loved—” her father sighed into her hair, “—and don’t you ever forget that.”
54.
Because It Was Real
Carmen didn’t know how much time had passed with her lying there, wrapped and safe in her father’s embrace.
“I’m sorry,” her dad said after several minutes, breaking the silence that had fallen among them.
“For?” Carmen pulled her brows together, her eyes feeling heavy now.
“You never being able to open up before the way you did right now, for never giving you an opportunity where you could’ve learnt to vent or let people in.” He sighed a deep sigh like it came from somewhere rooted within his soul. “I shut myself off and you learnt to do the same and now…. Now you’re struggling and in pain. This is all my doing.”
“Dad?” Carmen pulled away and looked at him with a certain level of seriousness she knew she hadn’t displayed before. “What happened with Asa wasn’t your fault.”
Her father sighed and reached forward, picking up the photo album and flipping through the pages. “Maybe not entirely,” he muttered. “Not directly. But…I had a hand in it, didn’t I? The kind of environment you grew up in, that restriction on displaying your emotions. The Rutherfords did that ever since I can remember. And after your mum died, I did it too.”
Carmen shrugged. “I suppose it was easier… to block out the pain, the guilt.”
“I suppose it is,” he agreed, his eyes glazing over. “Maybe that’s why I threw myself into the shifts at the hospital so much, because there, I could keep saving lives. Every day, every hour. But it doesn’t work that way, does it? I must have saved countless people by now, but it still doesn’t take away the hole in my life where Sophia used to be. It doesn’t take away the guilt that I couldn’t save her, my own wife.”
“I think…” Carmen paused. “I think I understand that she was in a lot of pain. But she didn’t just rid herself off it. She passed that pain on to everyone else when she decided to end her life. And I think it’s that part I don’t understand. I don’t understand why she’d pass on that pain to all those who loved her, to those who’d never done her wrong.” Carmen looked down at her hands, running her forefinger against her palm. “It makes me wonder: who was she really punishing?”
“You keep asking yourself questions like those and the only thing you’re going to get in return is more unanswerable questions, Carmen.”
“I need to learn to put this whole thing to rest, don’t I?” Her lips curved up into a shaky smile. “I can’t keep letting it have such a huge hold on me, Dad. It’s not letting me connect with anyone—with Joyce, or Willa. I even met this other girl, Lyra, who seemed really nice, but I never made a move to let that acquaintance progress into a friendship because that would mean opening up myself to them and letting them in. Showing them parts of my world, my life.”
“You connected with Asa, though,” her dad commented, curiosity evident in his tone as he shot a look from the corner of his eyes at Carmen. “How’d that happen?”
A ripple of pain tore through Carmen, forcing her to tear her eyes away from her dad’s.
“He was different,” she whispered, an image of him grinning with that trademark mischievous glint in his eyes flashing in Carmen’s mind.
“Different how?”
Carmen didn’t answer that immediately, taking her time to gather her thoughts that seemed to be running wild lately and formulating them into words and coherent sentences. Sentences that would do Asa justice. That she could give him at least, for now.
“It was effortless,” she eventually said, feeling her stomach tie into a gigantic knot before it slowly loosened up and untangle itself, soothing her insides. “Getting to know him, growing attached to him and then eventually falling for him… it was so effortless.”
Her dad tilted his head to the side, frowning slightly. “Then why did things go wrong?”
Carmen smiled sadly. “Like I said, falling for him was effortless. So much so that I forgot that relationships weren’t.”
“Honey, you were in no position to get involved in a relationship. Not yet, anyway. Falling in love is one thing, but pursuing that is a whole other matter. Why would you let him think you were ready when you weren’t?” Her father’s brows were pinched together, a whirlwind of worry and grief swimming in his sea-green eyes.
Carmen looked down at her lap, playing with her fingers, the guilt and shame overwhelming her all of a sudden.
“Because—” she paused to steady her trembling voice, her breaths turning heavy “—because he told me he loved me in a time when I needed to hear it, and it felt…it just felt nice to be loved. I’d lost Mum, lost Hunter, was slowly losing my dad. And then this boy—this amazing boy who always gave up on himself but never on others—comes strolling into my life one September afternoon and makes me feel like I’m actually the centre of someone’s world. His world. And after feeling unloved for so long, I didn’t want to let go of that. Of him. I couldn’t.”
Her dad didn’t say anything for a while, keeping his mouth pressed into a firm line for several seconds. He didn’t look too happy though, Carmen noticed. And she didn’t blame him.
“Carmen,” her dad finally said, voice gentle but stern at the same time. “The boy loves you. He really does. It was obvious from the fight itself.” He searched Carmen’s face for a brief moment, and she wondered what it was that he was looking for. “But if you’ve never loved him, if it was his attention and affection for you that you loved instead, then you need to let him know. The pain your mother left behind has caused enough scars and inflicted enough hurt. Don’t let an innocent get caught in the crossfire of the war this family’s fighting.”
There was life’s cruel sense of irony again. This whole thing had started when Asa had made Carmen a casualty of the battle he was fighting inside his head the instant he took her journal.